Charlie had throat cancer, Keith had brain surgery, I had my lung op – and then it was Mick’s heart...
The Rolling Stones guitarist talks for the first time about why Mick Jagger’s recent health drama hasn’t slowed them down
THE DRINK GENE RUNS IN THE FAMILY, ALONG WITH MUSIC, ART AND HAVING A PARTY
Ronnie Wood is hopping between rooms of a luxurious suite in a London hotel, simultaneously drinking coffee, telling anecdotes, rubbing his fingers through the jet black spikes of his hair and asking for recommendations on local restaurants and Netflix ‘bingers’.
The Rolling Stones guitarist does not stop moving. Or talking. The stories he tells about his sex, drugs and rock’n’roll wild days make you laugh, gasp and wonder not only how he’s still sitting here in front of you but also how he’s managed to clean up, marry up (his intelligent, wholesome theatre producer wife, Sally, is nearby) and at 72, step up his workload. He’s just completed a recent world tour with the Stones, made a solo album, Mad Lad, a tribute to Chuck Berry, and a documentary with the awardwinning director, Mike Figgis, Somebody Up There Likes Me.
‘I can’t believe I’m still here either,’ he says with a raspy laugh, banging on his chest to indicate lungs free of the cancerous lesion that was removed two years ago. ‘Cocaine, heroin, booze, freebasing [smoking pure cocaine], I went for it all, but it’s the fags that are almost the hardest to kick. I went to the precipice and I looked over it but I never let myself drop down. Even in my maddest days I knew when to stop because there would be a thought in my head: “I want to do this and that and I can’t if I keep going.”’
He’s lucky to have survived, as some of his friends didn’t make it. ‘I’d be with [The Who’s former drummer] Keith Moon and people who didn’t know when to stop. Pills were the worst. Keith would knock back piles of them and I’d be saying: “Hang on man, don’t take ’em all.” There were definitely levels of insanity. And you could see it all around you. When Keith died [in 1978, from an overdose of pills prescribed for his alcoholism] we didn’t think it was a tragedy, we thought it was an inevitability. Pete Townshend wasn’t grieving, he was furious because he knew what an idiot Keith had been with the drugs. So even in the midst of the madness you knew what was going to take you to over and out.’
In the documentary, his long-term friend, partner in crime and bandmate Keith Richards remarks how physically tough both he and Wood are, both blessed with genes strong enough to help them survive their addictions and insane exploits as rock stars. As Wood shows me the small cut on his throat, the only legacy of his cancer, I ask him how worried he was for Mick Jagger when in March he was forced to postpone their recent tour because of a heart operation to replace his aortic valve.
He looks a little bemused. ‘Worried? For Mick? No, I wasn’t worried at all. He called us all to see him in his hotel room and told us what was going on, which was a bit of a gob-smacker at the time. But he had the good old doctor who did my op overseeing everything and I knew he’d be fine. Me and Sally and Keith and Patti [Hansen, Richards’s wife] went to The Turks and Caicos Islands with the kids and we’d send Mick little videos of us all singing and messing about to make him smile. I had every faith in Mick and every faith in the good old doc.’
Wood pauses to reflect on their brushes with mortality: ‘We’ve all been through it. Charlie [Watts] had his throat cancer [in 2004], Keith had his brain surgery [2006], I had my lungs done and then it was Mick’s heart. But we’re all war babies. Something to do with all that rationing or whatever has given us these iron constitutions. Nothing stops us. Survival of the fittest. We don’t stop rolling.
‘It was probably Keith who was most worried about Mick, not that he’d admit it. Mick’s a madman – he was back in the gym going full pelt a few weeks after his op. Keith was on at me for weeks to come with him and have a word with Mick’s trainer, to tell him to slow down. But you can’t tell him. It’s what he does.’
Wood grabs me to emphasise his disbelief. ‘The operation he had, I mean the doctors have history of all these guys in their 50s and 60s who have had this op, but there’s no precedent of someone who has it done and then in three months’ time is on a stage running ten miles a night, four-to-five days a week. Keith’s keeping his beady eye on him all the time and he’s not even out of breath. Medically, he’s in his own league.’ He shakes his head in wonder at Jagger’s constitution.
Wood is endlessly entertaining but hard to keep on track and easily distracted. Dates are fuzzy but memories are pin-sharp, from the Ossie Clark handmade top he wore in his own side band, the New Barbarians, in 1979, to his encyclopaedic recall of every record that inspired him and every musician he’s played with. The documentary charts his life from his early days in Hillingdon, west London. His family were the first of generations of ‘water gypsies’ (like the Shelby family from Peaky Blinders) to be born on dry land. ‘Alcohol was a problem with all the men in my family – my dad, who regularly fell asleep in other people’s gardens after nights in the pub, and my brothers. That gene, it ran in the family, along with music, art and having a party.’
As a musician, Wood earned his stripes playing with some of the greatest performers of the day such as The Birds (the British R&B group, not their American near-namesakes The Byrds) and Jeff Beck, and his great friend Rod Stewart in Faces, having honed his craft from an
early age listening to Chuck Berry, who he salutes on his new album. In his early 20s he was asked to play guitar in the band that would become Led Zeppelin but turned it down (‘I can’t join that bunch of farmers’ were his exact words) to remain alongside Rod Stewart. It was a time of riotous living, with all the British bands playing and partying together, and Wood admits the Stones were the band in his sights ever since he first saw them play in Richmond in 1963. Eleven years later, he happened to be at the film director Robert Stigwood’s party with Jagger and the Stones’ then guitarist, Mick Taylor. ‘Mick Taylor got up and said to Mick: “I’m leaving the band” and just walked out of the room. Mick looked at me and said: “What are we going to do? Will you play on our album?” I said: “I thought you’d never ask.”’ He played guitar on the Black And Blue album and then in 1975 when Faces broke up became an official Stone.
It’s fascinating to listen to Wood when he talks about the fantastically dysfunctional family that is the Rolling Stones. Back in the day, between the various addictions, wives and stadium tours it sounds like a war zone. Richards broke several bones in various fights and accidents and Wood was his partner in crime. Despite being the closest of friends and drug buddies, they also had their fights. ‘There was one time Keith burst into my room and found me on the pipe [freebasing] with another woman [he was married to Jo Wood at the time]. Keith went mental, not so much because of the pipe but because of the woman. He’s actually very moral. He punched me right in the face and I grabbed him and tried to throw him out of the window. He punched me back and then I ran out and into the room next door where Mick and Charlie were writing together. I stood there covered in blood and said to them: “Look at what that b ***** d Keith has done.” Mick just looked up at me and said: “All right Ronnie, but we’re working here,” and they carried on with what they were doing. It was like that then, crazy was the normal.’
Wood admits he has always been attracted to crazy. ‘I always took risks and taking risks brought me a lot of pleasure,’ he says unapologetically. Drugs gave him the confidence to go on stage and feel invincible: ‘In the early days it was booze and then it was drugs.’ He could go on stage off his head and never miss a note, as could Richards. ‘I don’t regret any of it,’ he says. ‘There was an effect on the music – it was all part of the sound. It was the journey. You had to go through it to get to it. And then I met Sally and it wasn’t just that I had to stop, I wanted to stop.’
Ironically, the hardest part of becoming sober was playing with the Stones. ‘The first gig I did clean was terrifying,’ he recalls. ‘It was somewhere in Canada. I remember standing there thinking: “I can’t do this.” I’d never been out on a stage with nothing in my system, it felt like driving a car without a windscreen. I stood by the stage shaking. Keith was yelling at me shouting: “Rehab is for quitters, you weakling” and
I ALWAYS TOOK RISKS AND TAKING RISKS HAS BROUGHT ME A LOT OF PLEASURE
then Mick comes up and just puts his arm round me and says: “Ronnie, you will be all right. I’ve got you.”’ He laughs. ‘Keith has come up to me since and told me he’s proud of me. He just likes to test you.’
They remain famously tight. Richards, he reveals, has given up spirits and is a better man for it. ‘He’s still dirty [as in not clean]. He smokes red Marlboros and I go on at him for it, and he drinks beer but he knows his limits. There’s none of the fights – a lot of that aggression was caused by drink and drugs and it’s gone. It’s a happier ship. There were moments when it got sticky and I definitely think if I hadn’t been in the band, talking to Mick, talking to Keith when things got rough, they would have split years ago. But we’ve all moved on.’
One of the most revealing things about Somebody Up There Likes Me is the close bond between Wood and Jagger. Watts tells how it was Jagger who was the one who never gave up on Wood in his worst moments – which included a three-year chronic addiction to freebasing – and the notoriously nonchalant Jagger gives an unusually unguarded and affectionate account of Wood, telling how he always wanted to have the guitarist in the Stones and how his arrival on the scene changed the sound and dynamic of the band. ‘He made us more humorous. He’d be on stage singing along with the vocals, mugging at the crowd. Things just became more fun.’
Wood is clearly one of the beloved. There are few people in the industry who don’t have a Ronnie Wood story, and his affable nature and love of life have endeared him to the likes of Bob Dylan, who was one of the first to meet his newborn twin girls – now three years old. As he talks, he also asks hundreds of questions. He tells you about his paintings, about songs that changed his life, about a certain guitar riff that makes the hairs on the back of his neck lift. If he wasn’t a Rolling Stone, he says, he would be in a pub somewhere playing guitar.
Imelda May recalls him jumping unannounced on stage at a tiny club in Dublin to perform alongside her when she was 16. Nearly 30 years later, May is one of his ‘wild five’ co-stars in his Mad Lad live tribute to Berry. ‘When Chuck died two years ago I sat back and waited for the tribute albums to come out,’ he says, ‘but none came. I couldn’t believe it. His music changed my life. He was rock’n’roll.’
Wood played with Berry many times, along with Richards, another massive fan. ‘We were mates,’ says Wood. ‘We would talk about music. I remember him telling me he has this big secret and it was the fact he’d worn the same red trousers on stage for 17 years. I said: “Chuck, we all know that. We’ve all seen them.” But this record, it was a really fun thing to do and I’m going to tour with it, then next year it will be another tour with the Stones, so up and off.’ He is, he says, happier than he has ever been. His wife has transformed his life, but his recovery is put first in their lives. ‘It comes before everything else,’ he says, suddenly serious. ‘I’ve got my meditation books, my meetings. You can’t think, I’m sorted, because that’s when it all creeps up on you and you’re back on the bottle. And I want to be sober for Sally and my kids. All my kids. My grandkids [he has six]. I could be a grumpy old git towards the end and I don’t want to be that sour man. I like my life with my girls, my paintings, my kids bringing all their influences into play.’
He is becoming, at 72, rather woke. ‘I don’t eat red meat. Leah [his eldest daughter] is a vegan, Tyrone [his son] is saving the planet so we’ve been cutting back on plastics. I told Sally the other day I wanted to get a private jet for a tour and she said: “No way, Ronnie, have you any idea the damage that does to the planet?” I’ve been put in my place.’
Ronnie Wood With His Wild Five – Mad Lad: A Live Tribute To Chuck Berry is released on Friday. Somebody Up There Likes Me will be in cinemas on November 26.